Welcome to “Toy Soldiers for Old Gits” or what we call TSOG! This is a place where three actually four regular guys henceforth known as the Old Gits will ramble on about all scales of Toy Soldiers, various War Game Rules, record their AAR’s and comment on all manner of other war gaming stuff in general. Should be fun for every war gamer on the Inter Web...hmmm do people still say that? Anyway read on and enjoy!

·Boarding continues next turn, boarder can
elect to keep sending men (1) across if able until defender strikes.

·If the vessel being boarded wins, they are
able to counter board next turn (or not)

·Cannon fire from both ships is halved during
boardings

Design Notes:

We liked lots about GW Trafalgar. Those
roster sheets with convenient firepower stats, damage tables, the simplistic
mechanic of hit and save, lots of dice being rolled, raking effects and so on.
But there was a lot not to like. We wanted more than some comic simulation, we
wanted a bit more reality. This is what we came up with.

Time and Distance Scale

We figure that Trafalgar is based on a turn
time of about 90-120 seconds. This is the reload time for the cannon, which can
fire every turn. It also corresponds to the movement distance, 14cm to scale
for a first rate being 183 yards in real life, which, in 90 seconds, represents
a speed of 3.66 knots at 1:1200 scale. Not too bad an approximation. The
IgoUGoturn sequence complicates this a
bit and makes ships pack more firepower than they really had, since the turns
are presumed to overlap.

Sailing Template

The sailing template is modified so that
ships cannot now outperform 12m yachts. Or, in fact, any sailing craft ever
designed. A significant bone of contention. Even sailing 60 degrees into the
wind is very optimistic.

0 to 60 degrees either side of the wind is
“luffing” or “in irons”, ships can only point into this zone if they wish to
luff, change tack or involuntarily be caught “in irons”. Luffing is executed to
reduce speed, and means walking the line between beating and being too close to
the wind. It is a voluntary maneouvre.

60 to 90 degrees either side of the wind is
beating. You must be beating to windward in order to initiate a tack.

90 to 150 degrees either side of the wind
is reaching.

150 to 180 degrees is running.

You might like to modify these arcs
slightly for different rates of ships, making it worse for higher rated ships
(80 degrees is the closest a first rate could sail to the wind, if that, from
my research).

We used old CD protector blanks to make
templates, from the days when CDs and DVDs could be bought in packs and had one
on the top of the stack.

Tacking

Tacking was a well practised and common
maneouvre. It didn't result in damage to masts and rigging 10/36 of the time (a
command check for a 6th rate or higher captain, worse odds if you
were in a more nimble ship). You only take a command check if under fire or
with damaged rigging.

The Trafalgar tacking maneouvre was woeful.
You move “normally” into the wind after taking a command check and executing a
sharp turn. It could, therefore, execute its full remaining distance allocation
almost directly into the wind and simply tack out of this position the next
turn. Huge advantage to be able to move upwind in this fashion. Add to that the
beating angle was around 15 degrees, wth ? The whole essence of this game is to
treasure the weather gauge. Not to turn 74s into speedboats.

So, replace that with the simple maneouvre
shown in the above rules, essentially this represents losing all way off the
ship, turning through the wind in a whole turn and end up facing on the
opposite tack with way on. This takes two turns, which, according to the time
scale, is 3-4 minutes, which is somewhat under that reckoned for a frigate (5
minutes) but at least in the ball park.

Firing

This is a problem for any IGOUGO play
sequence. It is ludicrous to imagine two ships, on parallel courses, travelling
at the same speed, where ships alternately overtake each other and fire with a
penalty as they pass.

To resolve this we adopted the fire as you bear rule without penalty.You may fire at any point in the movement phase
without penalty as she bears. Essentially, you do not wait until the end of the turn to initiate firing unless
you want to. This method permits ships alongside each other, firing at the
start of a players turn as one ship moves away and then at the end of the next
players turn where they move alongside each other again.

The firing arc is changed as well. With the
fire as you bear rule modification, it is simpler to use a straight out arc of
fire. You will get shots off without having to position your ship at the end of
the turn. Thank Sam Mustafa for that simplification, taken from Lasalle.

If you are really keen, you might like to
adopt a superiority gunfire rate. Brit ships fire every turn they are able,
everyone else fires two out of three turns.Or worse.

Hits Table

Modified as above. Removing the comic
effect ship on fire or explosion results.

The roster cards have been rewritten to
account for progressive damage. As each shaded box is crossed off, remove one
of the specified crew, guns or rigging.

Weather Rolls

The Trafalgar rules writers have obviously
never been to sea or contemplated that the weather does not change
significantly in the space of a minute or two. Sure the rules only give a 1/6
chance of this happening, but that could result in significant sailing
condition changes. Considering a game turn is about 90 seconds long, these odds
mean the wind changes, possibly significantly, on average every 9 minutes. More
if you are good at rolling ones. You could, also, on a roll of 1-6-1/2 and a
subsequent roll of 1-6-5/6 go from becalmed to a gale. Unlikely odds wise,
improbable in real life. Trafalgar Authors, go home, you are drunk.

We simply don't use wind or weather changes
for our short games. If you must, I suggest a mechanism for a possible change
after 6 turns, varying the wind strength and direction by a Beaufort scale or a
point. Up to you.

Tacking in light winds is also a problem,
anything less than 10knots and tacking is probably not possible for the square
rigged ships we are dealing with.

Collisions

We gave the option to a ship to avoid a
collision by sailing away. This might not be possible, so apply some logic. If
you allow half movement for the ship to avoid a collision it represents the
half turn overlap. The ship might then have half movement available next turn.
A ship upwind would find it difficult to collide with a ship with the same
sailing characteristics which is downwind that has time to react.

Boarding

After a collision. We tried to simulate a
boarding ship sending crew across, a total of 1 crew box while the ship being
boarded puts half of her crew up to defend. Example, boarding ship rolls 2d6
+1, defending ship rolls 2d6 +4 (for a fully crewed first rate). The loser
crosses off the crew box. The ship being boarded continues to fight if she
loses, possibly fighting with worse odds next turn as the boarder sends across
more crew. If the attacker loses, they have the option of boarding again or
might have to fend off a counter attack. Boarding is not easy.

The
Future

We came to the conclusion that most Age of
Sail games run into most difficulty with the IgoUGo sequence. A possible
workaround is to use the mechanic from Wings of War or X-Wing: have maneouvre
templates for each ship depending on their orientation to the wind. Chose one,
which represents 30 seconds of movement, and play it simultaneously with all
other players. Repeat a total of three times (90 seconds) and allow firing once
in a sequence of three movements. Lots of cards, lots of ships. Lots of
counters or smoke markers to see who is eligible to fire. I think this would
capture the essence of swinging the large ships around.

The other deficiency I see in the modified
rules are the speed changes. You are obliged to move full movement allowance.
In reality ships could spill wind and slow down. This would be a progressive
thing, so optional to allow players to move any distance up to their movement
rate, with possible speed indicators to allow +/- 3cm from the previous speed.